This page will serve as a plain-language privacy policy/data use statement. My day job is in digital marketing, so I’m familiar with the norms of the industry, and how much they suck! And I don’t want to obfuscate things or keep information from you.
So! Here’s what data I may collect from you (including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), such as name, email address, etc), and how, and what I would do with it!
tl;dr the only PII I get is what you explicitly and consensually give me, which can be deleted at any time, and will only be used for stuff related to this site. Data is automatically collected via Google Analytics and other Google services, which, by law, does not give me your PII
This website
I have Google Analytics now! And Google Tag Manager. This allow me to see the number of people who click various things, what states/countries visitors are from, what languages/operating systems/computer types they use, and stuff like that. The only thing that you might not necessarily expect is what you search for using the search box.
All of this data is given to me in aggregate and does not include any PII, so I have no way of knowing what any individual is doing, where they live, etc.
All of this now has a consent banner that automatically pops up on my site. You are free to choose whatever you want, and it will not affect your experience on this site at all. I chose options that give you the most privacy and most protection by law. If you tell your web browser to automatically decline/block tracking, my site can detect that and automatically apply those settings for you.
My webhost (Dreamhost) collects data on you in order to serve you, but I do not have access to any of that.
You can leave a comment on posts, if you wish, and I can see those, along with whatever username/email/website you attach with it, plus the timestamp the comment was made. I have the ability to delete comments, which I will do if they are spam or abusive. I imagine the anti-spam comment tool Akismet looks at additional info to auto-detect spammy users and comments and catches them in a spam filter, but I do not get shown any of that.
WordPress and AI
I’m sure you’ve seen the whole thing with “WordPress” and handing over content to AI. Do not worry, I am a professional hater, and AI is one of the things I hate the most.
WordPress dot org is a non-profit that makes the software package for WordPress sites, which you then install on whatever webhost you pay for/set up. That is what this WordPress site is. It is not a WordPress dot com site that is being managed by Automattic, who are the guys who are selling content for AI. The only plugin from Automattic that I use (Akismet) sends data regarding comments to Automattic for spam detection. Like I mentioned in the section above, comments are entirely voluntary, so if you are not comfortable with that, you don’t have to leave a comment.
But also I’m aware that there’s plenty of AI companies that scrape the Internet for anything they can get their greedy little hands on to feed into their LLMs. And also they ignore robots.txt. The only way I could slow them down would be to make my text in a form that is not-machine readable, but then it would also be a huge middle finger to anyone who needs accessibility tech (screen readers etc.).
So, uh, yeah. I am doing whatever I can to keep my content/data (and, therefore, your content/data) from going into LLMs and AI companies, but also it’s impossible. But I’m going to fight it whenever I can.
General AI statement
Fuck AI, fuck everyone who makes it, funds it, and uses it. None of you will enter the kingdom of heaven. Every single thing you see on here, or that I have ever made, or ever will make, has been made by human hands or with computer tools that are understood not to be AI (i.e. I use spell/grammar check in word, but I do not blindly accept those suggestions without thought. I use “filters”/tools in GIMP when I make images, but nothing is being “generated” out of nothing. I still gotta make the image).
I am aware that I use tools and software that are owned/operated by companies that are engaging in AI (e.g. Google, Microsoft). But it’s kind of impossible to exist as a professional writer and never use Word, or be a gamer, or own a phone, without giving any sort of money/data to these companies. I do whatever I can to keep my data out of these programs, I do not use these tools/features (honestly fuck Zoom for putting that shit in there and you can’t consent to your stuff not being recorded/added), and I definitely do not use any tools/services by AI-only companies.
I do not and will not promote any artist or “artistic work” that I know or suspects used AI in its making. If I end up doing so, please know it was entirely by accident. Please alert me to this, and I will remove it/post an apology ASAP. This is a topic I have incredibly strong opinions on, and I will not be swayed.
Also fuck NFTs and fuck crpyto, but I’m sure you probably guessed I held those opinions by now lol
The email list
I have an email marketing list via mailchimp. You can sign up for that if you wish, and whatever info you put into that is voluntary. You are free to unsubscribe at any time; there will be an unsubscribe button in every email, but you can message me directly and I can delete you from the list manually, if you want! You can find my contact info under “contact info” in the header. My email address is on there. Sorry for making you hunt for it, but I want to make things a little difficult, to keep bots away.
Mailchimp has “analytics,” and the only ones I have turned on are very basic. I will get information such as X number of people opened the emails and Y number of people clicked the link. These are numbers of total actions, and there is no way I can tell if you specifically clicked something or deleted the email unread. I will use this information to see if people actually like my emails and change things (like the subject line or content) to make them perform better, but this is by using my brain and not having an algorithm making the choices for me.
Which means content that you actually want to see! You are signing up for my email list because you are interested in me and my writing, and that’s all you’re going to get. I won’t be selling Raid Shadow Legends to you or saying, oh, it’s arbor day! Please go buy my book. The only emails you will get are:
- Automated “system emails,” such as confirming you subscribed or unsubscribed to the list. Mailchimp handles these automatically
- An email containing a reward for subscribing, such as a free story, if applicable
- “Major announcements,” which means…
- When a story is released for the first time, with links for where you can check it out and some fun info about the story
- When a story is re-released in a notable fashion, such as a “best of” anthology, as an audio adaption, or is now in a free format (and the original publication was behind a paywall)
- If one of my novels ever gets picked up by a publisher
- If I ever win a Hugo or Nebula or something like that, but that’ll probably never happen, but I also feel the need to list it here so that I’ll be 100% honest with you
Overall, this means you will get an email from me once a month, but probably more like once a quarter.
I will never sell your information. I will only share it if I am required by law, and I probably wouldn’t even have a choice; mailchimp would hand it over the moment they see a warrant without asking me about it at all. I will not give your emails to other writers or external marketing companies or ad networks. I will also not look up your email to figure out more stuff about you and bug you to follow me on Twitter or something. Those email addresses will remain in mailchimp.
I respect you and your time and I am not going to waste it on stuff that is irrelevant to you. As a digital marketer, I know just how much garbage that gets sent out, and how aggressive companies can be to get you to complete a transaction. You won’t be getting any of that here.
Affiliate – Bookshop.org
I have links on my website and some of my emails for books that are available to purchase on bookshop.org. It is both a “bookseller” (it’s really stretching the definition of that lol) and an affiliate marketing platform. It allows me to make some money from driving them sales, above and beyond any royalties I might earn from having one of my books sold.
bookshop’s links are built as follows:
https://bookshop.org/a/[ID]/[ISBN]
The ID is the unique identifier for the affiliate (i.e. me). The ISBN is the industry-standard identifier for a book. This tells bookshop that I, Chase J dot XYZ, am linking to a specific book, so, if someone who landed on the site via that link buys something, I should get some money for it. There are no additional tracking parameters built into the URLs, and there are no cookies in my site related to affiliate, either.
If you buy something from bookshop.org (doesn’t have to be the book the link was for) and it says I’m the affiliate in the upper-left corner of the screen, then the sale is attributed to me, and I make money. 10% of the price of the book (so not taxes or shipping). For a $20 book, I would make $2.
The only information I would get is that an order was placed for book A, for $B, on date C, and, therefore, I will make $D once the transaction is “complete.” Which is about 14 days after the book has shipped, in case you return the book and/or get a refund. I don’t get to make money from a sale that un-happens. I do not get your name, address, payment info, or anything like that. Nothing personally identifiable.
bookshop.org will collect and use your address, payment info, etc in order to sell and ship you the thing you ordered. You will need to look at their own privacy policy to determine what additional things they might use it for and how to have that info deleted.
Affiliate – Amazon
I’m sure you’re familiar with these guys. Amazon tells me how many people clicked my links, how many people bought stuff, and what stuff was bought. I have no way of knowing that it was any particular person, or where it was shipped to, or any PII like that. Since this is Amazon, and they sell everything, you might end up buying something you might consider embarrassing along with the thing you got linked to, and I might get attribution for that item, too.
So I might see that you bought a 50 gallon barrel of lube along with one of my books. That would be pretty cool, actually, since those things are expensive and I would get a nice bit of money! But since I have no idea who bought it, or what things you might have bought in other orders, I have no way of judging you. Amazon is going to judge you a hell of a lot more than I ever can with their suggested items for you to buy, but I don’t get any of that info.
If you want your order history and etc removed from Amazon, you need to request it from them.
Affiliate – other
There are a lot of other affiliate programs out there! And, boy, do I know them! At present, I am only using bookshop.org and Amazon. It’s a big pain to have a bunch of different programs and to manually make a ton of links. If I ever join more programs, I will update this document!
GDPR/CCPA/etc
Please see the “this website” section for specific data that is collected on you. The privacy policy/cookie use documents are boilerplate, but I’m not doing anything with your data. Requests for data deletion will need to be made to, say, Google or Dreamhost for them to delete your data, since they possess it, not me. If there’s ever anything I do have that you want deleted (such as a comment you made or your info on my mailing list), I will gladly remove it ASAP. Just shoot me an email with the relevant info and I’ll take care of that for you!
I do not have physical/off-site backups of my site (which maybe is not a smart idea), and I definitely do not have backups of my mailing list, so there is no concern that if you request your data to be deleted that it’s still secretly existing on a ZIP drive in a storage locker somewhere. Well, that might be the case for mailchimp, but that would be for their big ol’ database that they are storing for their own purposes and I do not have access to. You would have to check their privacy/data use policy for specifics on that.
etc
This was first written on Nov 16 2023 and was last updated on Sep 13 2024 (info on GA/GTM + fuck AI).
If there’s anything on here you have any questions about, please shoot me a message and I’ll be happy to help (and then I can clarify it on here to make things easier for future readers).